


Silver and Flames

by peanutbutterandbananasandwichs



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, Young Dean Winchester, Young Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 17:39:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3177759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peanutbutterandbananasandwichs/pseuds/peanutbutterandbananasandwichs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam is bought a knife for his ninth birthday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silver and Flames

**Author's Note:**

> Tangentially related to [this fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3132269), although both can be read just fine as a stand alone.

Sam knows it didn’t really die here. 

It died on Christmas eve in a dingy motel room with hot, wet tears streaming down his face. 

In the fire and the flames that consumed the house, his mother and everything that had made them real people, not the shadows they’d become flitting in and out of the world, skulking in the shadows. 

And later Sam would come to realise that it died even before then, on a rain soaked street outside of Lawrence, with a dead lover and a desperate kiss. At the beginning of time. But when he thinks about it, it still feels like this was the moment. 

This was when his childhood ended.

\---

May 2nd 1992

“What is it?” Sam asked, eyeing, with more than a little suspicion, the small, brown paper package his father held out stiffly towards him. 

“What do you think it is?! It’s a birthday present stupid!” Dean appeared from behind John and, grinning ear to ear, dropped himself down on the bed next to Sam. “Go on then!” he gave Sam an enthusiastic and somewhat painful nudge in the ribs as Sam took the proffered item. 

Sam’s hands fumbled at the edges of the sticky-tape, carefully peeling it back, trying not to rip the paper. He felt at a total loss, he hadn’t received a birthday present since he was five, well not from dad at any rate. Dean usually tried to scrape something together, even if that something was just a half melted candy bar, or, once a thoroughly inappropriate magazine Dean had swiped from the check in desk of the motel they’d stayed at a week earlier. But this was from dad. 

John’s gruff voice cut through Sam’s thoughts “don’t pussy-foot around with it boy” he grunted. Sam swallowed, he looked up at John briefly, then back at the parcel. Dean gave him another sharp poke. He gripped the paper and pulled, tearing it from end to end. He’d clearly over-compensated though as something long, thin and that flashed briefly as it caught the dim motel room light tumbled out of the paper and onto the floor. “Sorry! Oh I’m s-sorry” Sam leapt to his feet to retrieve the item, feeling a warm flush spreading across his cheeks, as he scrabbled back to the bed. “Smooth” muttered Dean, Sam flashed him a scowl, somewhat mired by the rosy glow of embarrassment that had reached his nose by now. “Well” John said “this makes you a real hunter now Sammy” he paused then added “not that you’d guess from that display” under his breath. 

Sam turned his eyes to the object grasped in his hand. It was a knife. Small, silver blade, plain, practical and unadorned, save for three words scratched into the wooden handle. On one side was his own name “SAM” the other was inscribed “FROM DAD”, it occurred dimly to Sam that coming from other parents there might have been a “love” in there somewhere, but then again other parents probably didn’t give their nine year olds knifes for their birthdays. Sam looked up at John and he saw the corner of his mouth twitch into something that could have approximated a smile. His gaze returned to the knife. It was only small, but as John’s words echoed in his head “this makes you a real hunter now” it felt suddenly as if it were made of lead. 

But there was Dean, still grinning widely, excitement and expectation etched across his face, Sam forced his features into a smile and gave a slightly mumbled “thank you”, trying not to look either of them directly in the eyes lest they caught the look he still felt lingered behind them. Dean practically bounced off the bed as he exclaimed “come on Sammy, I’ll teach you how to fight with it!” before adding a hasty “if dad says it’s ok…” John nodded as Dean grabbed Sam’s still slightly chubby hand in his and dragged him outside to the deserted car park. 

Sam, as it turned out, was a natural, his small frame was ideally suited to the ducking, weaving flow, and after a time he even found himself beginning to enjoy it, it felt almost more like dancing than fighting, he could almost forget that someday it would be something much bigger, fastest, sharper toothed than his brother on the other end. Eventually they both collapsed to the ground, exhausted and laughing dumbly at each other. Just as Sam was attempting to clamber back to his feet, he found his eyes drawn toward the motel room doorway, John stood, leaning slightly upon the frame and watching him with a look Sam wasn’t sure he entirely recognised, but if he had to make a guess, he would have said something approaching ‘pride’. The smile slipped from his lips. Somehow it wasn’t as comforting as it should have been.

\---

May 5th 2006

They work in silence, barely even looking at one another. 

Dean assembles the crates that will form the platform, while Sam gathers branches, breaking the longer ones over his knee, snapping off twigs and collecting dry leaves for kindling. They both let the work consume them, focus them. 

Sam thinks about the placement of every last piece of wood with meticulous detail, to make sure it’ll burn hot and long enough to fulfil its purpose. When they are done, Sam tries to fuss with the last few branches for a minute or so longer, ‘if he just moved them a fraction to the right…’ but Dean gently pushes him away, their first interaction in hours. 

Dean carefully slots his arms under the white wrapped form and then lifts up their father’s body. He looks like he’s struggling slightly with the weight, but when Sam inches forward to help he just shakes his head slightly and Sam falls back, watching as Dean reverently places John upon the crates. As cold and distant in death as in life, Sam knows his hands aren’t fit to touch him, to sully the pure white linen. 

He feels tears trickling down his cheeks; he bows his head, keeping his face hidden as Dean marches past him, heading back over to the Impala parked a little distance away, to fetch the gasoline. Sam wipes at his face with his sleeve, he glances over toward the car, and Dean’s busying himself with something in the trunk. Sam reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out the knife. 

Looking at it properly for the first time in years. His name is almost completely rubbed out, worn away from fourteen years of use. He turns it once and there on the other side, seemingly, miraculously untouched by the years “DAD”. And Sam feels the anger and frustration of a lifetime prickling through the guilt and the grief, because isn’t that how it’s always been? Sam erasing himself, losing everything that was him for dad’s damn war. And that’s how dad had always seemed, immutable, indestructible…and now… Sam looks up at the body, lying silent and cold, wrapped in its shroud upon the pyre and he feels himself shiver, with loss and pain and blame and anger. He reaches out knife in hand and places it upon his father’s chest. 

He remembers that brief moment of hopeful pride in John’s eyes when Sam had first danced about that motel car park with it and Dean and how every single moment since then he’d let him down “not good enough Sam” “can’t you even listen to one goddamn thing I tell you!”, all the fights “I’m glad your mother doesn’t know what a piss poor excuse for a son you turned out to be” “you walk away now don’t you dare come back” and those looks he sometimes gave of something deeper than disappointment. It feels as if somehow the knife contains all of these, the symbol of everything his father had planned for him and all the ways Sam had screwed it up. He remembers how heavy it had felt, when he’d first held it in his small, nine year old hands. He’s twenty two now, and well over six foot, strong and lean, but the weight of the knife feels no less. The weight of the childhood he never had holding it down. 

The feel of it sinking into flesh for the first time, scarlet beading and flowing down the blade, staining his hands in a way he could never scrub clean. Digging out the bullet from the hole in Dad’s shoulder “faster boy”. The mixture of relief and horror as he drew blood from his own arm for the first time, locked in the bathroom of the apartment, voice still horse from screaming at Dad, tears, still wet and sticky, clinging to his lashes. 

Dean comes back, if he sees the knife, now resting upon John’s sternum, he doesn’t say a word, he just pours the gas onto the pyre, he lights a match and holds it to Sam’s carefully placed kindling until there is a crackle as it catches and then leaps, licking hungrily over the gas soaked branches and up until it surrounds and envelopes the shroud wrapped form. Sam and Dean stand side by side now, Sam turning his head slightly to see his brother staring blank and unseeing into the flames, the lights dancing in his eyes. 

Sam turns his own eyes back to the pyre, he watches as the light of the flames glints off the knife blade, the tears start to fall again, white hot as the flames and this time he lets them, Dean won’t see them. The flames reach the handle. He watches as all that remains of his childhood is eaten away, it died so long ago, maybe now it can be laid to rest. It always belonged to dad more than him anyway.


End file.
